The Blender 101 Project and You!

With the upcoming 2.8, Blender is going to be an amazing tool for artists. However, not everyone is a professional working in a studio environment. Many are casual users. Some use Blender just for 3D printing, some to make models for games, and some just want to teach their young kids the basics of 3D. For these users, Blender’s all-in-one approach poses a huge challenge.

The Blender 101 project is about making Blender usable for everyone. Using features that’s going to be available in 2.8 such as Workspaces, Templates, and some good ol’ coding, we aim to achieve the goal of ‘Blender for every occasion’.

Just like how the new Workspaces in Blender 2.8 will optimize the interface for specific tasks(such as modelling, animation, sculpting and compositing), Templates will go one step further, transforming Blender into very focused applications that do specific things really well. Possible candidates for templates include:

Blender Simple

3D Printing

Games Creation

CAD

The template will be something that the a user can select from the splash screen of Blender:

By selecting a template, every aspect of Blender can be changed, including:

User preferences

Addons

Color schemes

Input maps

Units

Interface layouts

Manipulator widgets

Pre-built 3D assets and presets

Because Templates could be potentially big in size (since they may contain pre-made assets), they can be made available as separate downloads, and loaded into Blender like an addon. Some templates can be bundled in the default install. This is to be decided later.

Blender Simple

An ideal candidate for template is a massively simplified Blender. This template will strip down the interface to the bare minimum, encouraging inexperienced users to explore a 3D program without worrying about the consequences of making a mistake. The target audience for this are kids under 16 years old, or people who has absolutely no experience with computer graphics. The expectation is that one day, they will be able to ‘graduate’ to the full Blender without having to relearn a new interface.

Blender for 3D Printing

Even as 3D printing is gaining popularity, preparing a model for printing is still a complex and highly technical process. Together with Aleph, we want to make this process as simple as possible. The 3D printing template will have the bounding box and measurement units all setup, ready for you to create or cleanup your model. The template will also have the ability to carry out sanity checks on the model to ensure its printability.

Blender for Games

Blender is an ideal content creation platform for game engines such as Unity and Unreal. However, currently Blender doesn’t have a focused interface for game makers. If we can work to remove functionalities that’s irrelevant to game designers, and provide basic shaders and assets that are compatible with modern game engines, artists will have a much easier time creating content in Blender.

Keep in mind that because these templates are still running the same Blender under the skin, the files they create will be interchangeable. For example, one can always bring a model created in Blender Simple and retopologize it in the full version.

These are just some ideas for what the 101 project could bring. Our goal is not to ‘dumb-down’ the interface and pose artificial restrictions, but rather to optimize the interface for everyone’s individual needs.

After all, as Leo Tolstoy might have once said, “All happy blender users are not alike.”

Hi Dan, The 101 project is more about creating a platform for people to formally customize Blender’s behavior in way not possible before. Special effect tools you mentioned are outside of scope of this project.

I really like this idea since it’s about workflow optimization. I wonder if there’ll be a way to easily flip between these (at least in a way that makes sense). The idea reminds me a bit of Personas in the Affinity Designer/Photo applications which are meant to be focused on certain aspects.

Hey Lino, we want to design it without the need to switch Template during one project – that’s what Workspace is for. A single Template can still have multiple Workspaces to account for different tasks. But of course, since the underlying file is still a .blend file, switching templates on existing project should be still easy.

This sounds really cool and I am very curious as to the details. A couple of thoughts to help show where I hope this process is heading…

1. Making sure all templates carry across the same UX paradigm built upon the new Simple/Basic Blender workflow. For example making sure that if the user learns the workflow starting with the Simple layout, that what they use learn carries across into the other templates/sections. If each Template is a very different workflow or left up to the creator of each template to design, then the core UX pattern is lost and we get back to where we are today. Different tools and workflows don’t follow the same UX paradigm and makes it harder to learn and adopt.

Take into account something like Selection and Manipulation. (At the simplest level.) These should act and behave the same regardless of the template, tool, and window that you are in. If you are in the Simple Template, the Games Template, a 2D window, a 3D Window or a Special Dialog, Selection and Manipulation should for the most part work the same.

While it is cool (and powerful) to have the ability to change everything to each users liking, the core UX needs to be well thought out so that in general most people would not change the defaults because they work so well. I know I am probably preaching to the choir but I still thought I would put this out there.

You have a very valid point about UX consistency. The idea is to make Blender into a host platform for people to customize to their need. So while we cannot control the Templates people create out of their garage, the ‘officially supported’ templates should share a lot of UX paradigms with the full Blender. I want to avoid making the user relearn anything if possible.

All mentioned above were my main concerns, as well. I feel this is great for helping new users and users who work within these template guidelines. I’m glad this idea is being addressed. Of course, highly advanced functionality would either be accessible from a sub menu or simply switching to the full blender template.

Good point! CAD template seem really atractive! Will it possible make it work with lines and curves on command-base concept like AutodeskCAD or Rhino. I love working with Blender on rendering architectural images, but it difficult to work with CAD plans. Maybe just an optional addon to work at top view fixed with lines and curves in an easy way?

Working daily in Archviz with Blender I am also very interested in said CAD template.
Most of all I would love to see an improved snapping system along the lines of what’s developed here: https://developer.blender.org/T45734

Anybody who in his early Blender days ever opened somebody else’s file painfully knows how the application’s customization abilities are more weakness than strength. You want an interface where you go “I need x, I should look in place y” and it actually will be there. Cinema4D is achieving this. And obviously it does that by having a very static interface. Having different UI Views where things are in ever changing places will do nothing but harm to the cause of making things more accessible.

Of course it makes sense to have an interfaces that exposes functionality in an optimized way for given tasks. Blender has that already – the 3D View, the Dope Sheet, the Node editor, the Movie Clip Editor etc. These are naturally born interface-answers to the given feature types. The new workflows add an artificial additional interaction layer that tries to simplify things by making matters more complex.
This approach was proven wrong long ago already when people broke up their applications into animation programs and separate modeling programs instead of integrating things meaningfully.

I understand how you want to address people’s long lasting complaints about the UI but this is the wrong answer. Make it more static than dynamic and therefore more predictable. I know ‘innovation’ is sexier than getting the basics right but for instance a polished boring good outliner would benefit Blender far more than this.

As the DCC process gets more complex, it’s inevitable to break things up into specialized software(see ZBrush, Massive, Substance). That said, The 101 project is not aimed at changing Blender at all, beyond what 2.8 will bring.

Blender, as a DCC tool, will stay exactly the same. We are talking making Blender easier to use for users who normally wouldn’t be using blender at all(beginners and niche market, etc).

To account for that problem, I think that a good approach would be something like Adobe softwares workspaces* (*beware: not the same meaning as in Blender), which work by letting the user save its own panels positions/sizes. At any moment you can select a different workarea (as in Adobe) and the UI changes. So if you open someone else file with tools in odd places, you can load your preset anytime

Very nice idea, I want to add my experience as a BFCT working with university students:

Of course simplifying 3D is a hard task. Especially in Blender there are various things where people learning Blender tend to get stuck, e.g. the usage of the 3D cursor (combined with the right click paradigme), tools like circle select being active until the ESC key is pressed, varying sensitivity of the basic transform tools rotation and scaling depending on the mouse position and there may be many other examples, depending on the individual person as well. Personally I love those features and how Blender works, but beginners usually struggle with them.

Therefore, I want to suggest to add overlayed ui animations, especially for the simple layout, which focus the attention of new users on certain problematic areas where they could face difficulties. Like when they move the 3D cursor a short message might pop up asking “Did you try to select an object? Try using your right mouse button.“ or similar.
On the other hand this might also be less helpful than actually annoying. And naturally I am also very happy to have the opportunity teaching Blender while getting a little pay for it, so you have my support whatever direction this will take. Thank you Blender community! 🙂

Hey Adam, many of the tools in Blender are modal, but implemented in a very bad way. (eg. circle select requires esc to cancel, and does not allow navigation) We will have better modal tools that should benefit everyone. I like the idea of popups as long as they are not intrusive. The software should ask for forgiveness, not permission.

I am honored that you have answered to my post, Thanks!
I agree with you. Especially the navigation issue with circle select is something I hear complaints about all the time. As those are not issues related to the User Interface, I thought about how those issues can be handled with your idea of simplifying the UI. Again, I totally agree with you that such messages should be rather helping than distracting, so being as non-intrusive as possible is a number one priority.

For a while I’ve been trying to use blender to create tillable 3d textures and render off the texture, normal map and Ao and so on, but it’s not easy.
I’ve even tried using an array and with a combination of the start and end caps managed to get something that works.
I don’t know of any 3d software that can do this, and if it’s part of the blender games creation I can see it creating a big demand for blender

An upgrade f the transform manipulator tool will be nice. i worked with every 3d package and Softimage was the best shortcuts than i never seen in 3D app : it made difference between “press” and “hold”. Example Press V select Transform Gizmo and Hold V select momentary the transform operation, when release it take the previous tool. So perfect ! Minimize inefficient clic.
Have XY, YZ, XY axis on the tranform manipulator is more intuitive than CTRL clic on the axis that you want soustract = clic on the X to get YZ tranform, my brain don’t like negative way ^^
Really good initiative you had here.

I feel like blenders core workflow is built around hotkeys. Even the way people talk about blender and workflow tends to revolve around which hot keys to use rather than what functionality to use. Hotkeys should be accelerators to already well thought out UI paradigms. Not the core workflow. This approach makes it hard for new users to adopt. Especially when simple things like selection and manipulation are vastly different than fairly standard practices across many different types of applications.

A good well thought out user experience (UX) should be built with hotkeys being secondary and left more to the users discretion. It’s OK to have good and consistent hotkeys as standards, but they should not define the workflow.

the simplified Blender its not necessary or its not the correct approach to teach 3d blender.

First of all what kind of kids are you referring to?
Now days most kids are computer savvy! where are you going to find all of this Dumb Kids? and or why ? are you wanna create stupid kids!

A more efficient way of teaching 3d blender will be more beneficial and productive, until now most 3d blender users are a copy of each other, everyone is teaching how to make ‘realistic grass” or how to make a real ” rock “… this is the real area in most change needs to be focused on… move on from the standard or usual tutorials, if a subject is been covered, do not take or keep publishing the same type of tutorials, move to the next subject.

If you encourage a kid ( 8 to 10 year old ) to learn the stupid way this kid will be set up to fail right from the beginning, why in hell do you think this is a good idea to spend time and resources on it?

if you develop this type of workflow, now 3d blender will not only be plagued from repetitive tutorials but now also will be filled with useless one click dumb tutorials. that feels like a super dumb Idea!

This is the new ‘The Cathedral and The Bazaar’, GUI version. Users we get a real easy way to layout their own work spaces. Their own way. No more centralized UI and final design decisions, but much more freedom to expand and work as everybody like to or simply how people think it’s easier/simpler. Blender coders making history, as always! You guys deserves the world! Cheerios.

A suggestion if they improve even more the BGE with PBR and others, if they can improve the physics by adding physical technology MMD to objects and bones, fractures of automatic calculation. In logic game add pre script created as the movement of the camera with mouse and split screen, also would be useful a driver improvement to create an automatic navigation mesh, random mode of movement, jumping obstacles, etc. Happen, I know it’s crazy all this but they are suggestions that could improve the experience with the BGE.
If they can not now maybe in the future 3.00. Thank you

As a university professor in art and design, I am extremely excited about the prospect of a simplified/streamlined Blender; particularly if it could be used as a teaching platform for /foundational/ digital creation concepts. Too often (in the arts, anyway) we teach our students how to use specific software titles instead of the basic concepts which generalize to (and underpin) all digital art and design tools.

It’s a little like the situations in which medieval scribes were trained to make consistent and beautiful letterforms for producing manuscripts, but were not taught to read!

I can imagine a ruthlessly simplified Blender template that highlights those basic concepts and skills for teaching AND provides an especially coherent and consistent application-specific stepping stone to a more useful and more fully-featured tool (maybe with a couple of way-stations on the path to the full Blender experience).

I respectfully disagree with MAR10 that these days “most kids are computer savvy!” Frequent computer use, especially on the media consumption side, doesn’t necessarily produce competence or understanding on the creation side.

I applaud this effort―please let me know, Mike, if I can be of any help!

From Workshop write up >Because templates could be potentially big in size (since they contain assets), they will be made available as separate downloads.

How ‘big’ are these envisioned to be? I think I would rather download everything or everything I was interested in at once. I might have several or many interests in Blender. Already keeping up with updated add-ons is a pain. This proposal makes still more granulation to keep up to date. Could we at least nominate by checkbox on the release page which bits to include at once with the download of Blender please?

Just to clarify this. I support the idea of templates/specialisation however I don’t want to spend even more time chasing around looking for bits and pieces. I would actually rather have *everything* in a Blender download if that was only 50 mb more but, be minus game or architectural assets if they were say 250 mb each xtra. That is I would like to keep the templates in the core but offload large assets or make them optional. Thanks

Just to be a complete pain with my posts..
How about a template contains an example asset only with some provision to ‘get more’. This would be a link to BF or other repository. Anyhow Merry Xmas to Blender developers. Keep up the good work 🙂

The official Blender.org page will not be the only place to find Templates. We encourage others to make and distribute Templates as well. Especially since Templates represent niche tasks that only a very selected group of user will be interested – We will not be splitting off any existing Blender functionalities into a Template. As an example, I can see the interior design software Fluid Designer be templified, which is gigabytes in size due to the prefabbed assets it contains. So i dont’ see a good way to make all the templates downloadable at once.

Have you asked FD if they would use this at all? Perhaps they want to keep their branch separate. I understand quite a bit of it is already customised/unique so maybe templates don’t suit or would make extra work they don’t want to do. My understanding of the proposal of templates is that it is only presenting a more purpose suited UI and maybe some purposeful add-ons? so it doesn’t actually amount to much in most cases?? i.e. something like FD is the exception rather than the rule. Are we envisaging using templates to make numerous heavy departures from core Blender? I think Fluid Designer was only offering a sample of assets openly and the rest their customers pay for, or that’s what it was when they started. Perhaps it should be established how many of these templates there are likely to be – 10 or so, not hundreds? – and how many and large the download of assets are likely to be. If the templates in themselves don’t amount to much I don’t see why they cant all/mostly be included.If they are all represented as working templates with starter content then people can explore Blender’s possibilities. If it interests them to go further they can do so by following up on heavy assets.
I am sure you will work out something suitable but I wonder about what this flexibility actually amounts to in reality.

Templates makes me think more like coding templates in IDE’s – code snippets to expand on. And, in 3D, a template to me sounds like a predefined shape or rig setup to build upon as opposed to a UIX to build upon. So, in my opinion, Game Design and 3D Printing sound more like Workflows or Projects. And, Animation or Modeling sound more like Workspaces, Tasks or Layouts.

How will “template” sharing work? Is it going to be some copy/paste file into folder process, or will it be sort of like addons where you can install them?

It would be good to have a template specifically for editing and exporting movies, based around the sequencer and maybe incorporating the http://easy-logging.net/ addon.

Also, to keep things easy, specific presets to best render files for Vimeo and YouTube in either the output or encoding options.

That bit can often be a minefield if you don’t know what you’re doing or what all of the options mean. Streamlining the process of getting a good resulting video to upload would, I think, help beginners.

Please update FBX Binary 7.5 / 7.6 in next release! Good luck! I am hopeful because your Blender 2.5 to 2.7 are very good for me! Thanks! Wow your Blender 2.8 has full-support with Unity? How do you think? But it is very hard because It is not only Python. Just works with Javascript and C#. Please implement like Unity 5.5 / 5.6 features.

I will laugh if you can’t write more because C# and Javascript need prase from standalone application like Unity. Good luck!

This sounds like it will restrict the functionality of blender quite a lot. If you are let’s say, using the CAD mode to precisely model a 1:1 scale house, will you still be able to UV unwrap that house and give different faces different materials, and render the house? Can you then run a physics simulation using the house as a static rigidbody?

Though templates are a good idea, there should probably still be a way for you to use ALL the features for those of us who are indecisive, and get several ideas on the fly.

for those of us who do mostly CAD modeling in Solidworks (expensive, proprietary, and tied to Windows OS), can you include a nice simple interface similar to Solidworks that we can create CAD models on?!

If you do i would be eternally grateful! There are no real good Open Source or cross platform CAD software out there like Solidworks that work on Linux.

a) I had several failed launches with my Blender experience before things finally began to stick, the same well known information overload and getting to grips with both the UI and all the functions/hotkeys. It’s such an awesome toolset and the project is, without blowing wind up the collective, such a great advocate of what open source can and should be – it’s a shame if there were unnecessary barriers to entry/access ; and

b) sometime in the next 18 months I’m going to be releasing a Unity game to market.. my current intent is to build a Blender 2.8+ template that provides the users with all they need, and ONLY what they need, to create game levels and upload to the game servers for approval and incorporation.

I’ll be glad to send some $ into the Blender foundation should the game get any traction. besos

I hope this will, eventually, asses two very conceptual issues I think Blender has:

1) concurrently working with customized workflows in Blender is hard. The presets (maya, Max etc) don’t work without losing functionality. LMB mode same thing. Hotkeys are very confusing to change: you might lose functionality WITHIN a tool (which has multiple hotkeys for it’s use).
To optimize customization in Blender the hotkey editor could really use some refinement.

2) The UI is pretty clunky. Moving panels, windows etc is pretty tedious. This hopefully can be improved a lot (and rather considering the goals for this project will have to be improved immensely)

HI THERE
PLEASE ADD ANDROID SUPPORT IN GAME ENGINE AND CHANGE THE GREY LOOK TO BRIGHT COLOR
WHILE YOU GUYS ARE WAITING FOR
2.8
IM WAITING FOR 3.0
BECAUSE I BELIEVE THERE WILL B A GREAT CHANGE IN BLENDER GUI AND ETC AND OUR BLENDER WOULD BE JUST EQUAL TO PRO SOFTWARE OUT THERE
PLEASE DO A IMPROVEMENT IN MOTION TRACKING AND EASINES OF BLENDER
BYE WITH LOVE FROM INDIA ; ARUNMANI.

Workflow project seems like a great idea, dont forget to allow as much flexibility as possible where you can.
Im mostly doing content for games, and i would really apreciate if you put all the tools necesary for that togheter.
Also if you read this please, please consider implementing better baking system for blender, maybe contact and work with the guys that made xNormal program, it renders everything so nice and fast, i think they are using openRL.
The normal baking in blender suucks, sorry i dont mean to be rude, but its really bad and many artifacts when baking from high res to low res, same for AO.

Also if you could improve weight painting for games like Maya, its so hard to get good organic deformation on knees and joints.

These are ideas for blender for game artists future:
1.Put tools required for games togheter.

3.Improve weight painting for joints, and tools for painting. Also a new system for weighting clothes/armor layers for games, currently there is only one way of making this work by using a cage like proxy mesh around all layers of cloth with a mesh deform binding modifier, this is not suported in a game engine only in blender, its a pain to do any organic character with layers of cloth or armor.

4.Improve texture painting to something like quixel suite(ndo,ddo etc), or substance painter, old style export UV and paint outside blender is dying, its not professional anymore and poor quality results compared to direct texture painting on 3D mesh.While blender has texture painting, its not ideal, we need something different than stylized color painting, we need layers of textures and ability to do things like paint normals, remove paint texture layer with scrathces and reveal base metal layer underneath, add grime/dirt,AO etc like substance/quixel, its a MUST have for game content creation.

What im trying to say is we need to decouple blender from gimp/photoshop other tools as much as possible, i think blender should offer a complete suite of modern techiniques modelling/texturing tools start to finish, without becoming a photo editor lol.

Also get rid of game engine and useless legacy stuff think forward dont get hang up on past, make the blender render to opengl4+ or vulkan, and make it realtime quality deferred renderer, with AO, reflections and other simulations. Current blender render is old and cumbersome to work with,add texture,normals etc, and has very poor results.

These changes would really take blender to the next level.

I see a lot of development on artistic stuff, like cycles,effects and movie creation tools, but when it comes to games, the tools are very poor for todays standard.

I know im asking a lot, blender is free with little funding mostly geared towards animation artits and we already got a lot for free, but its a hard choice to invest time in blender, since we have to buy a whole suite of other programs photoshop,quixel,substance,zbrush,maya if hobbyists or indie developers had that kind of money we proabably wouldnt use blender.

I am trying to use this just for modelling and the biggest problem is export to other game engines etc. When I have built a model I would expect to create a .obj or something that just loads in product like unity that supports that same format. At this point though I have to separately export textures then re-apply etc.

This then lead me to lots of exploring of many different options to work out what I was doing wrong. It took a long time before I realised it was not possible. Perhaps a Modelling focused interface version would have stopped this. Certainly it could perhaps stop the confusion with rendering engines and export of models.

Users of 3D printing would generally look for something similar and I suspect Microsoft’s Paint3D or something will more generally fill in here. Perhaps the goal for Blender Simple would be to be the next step up towards “proper” 3D working?

I’ve been going through the Adobe Fusion 360 application and I like a lot of what they are doing: Each major function, including modeling and CAM has it’s own workspace similar to this Blender 101 project. I think it helps, but I agree with OKAPI that too much flexibility and chaos actually will make things harder.

As it stands I have several people using Blender for the NLE, and a focused view of this would be great, especially from opening the application. It would keep these people from wandering around trying to get to just find things. Awesome!

However, you still have the potential for creating custom versions and saving those as templates, and sharing those, and which one is better, and where do I download it from, and is it safe, etc. etc.

If you are going to do this, be sure to:
A) Absolutely nail it for each area of design
B) Make it easy to get to another area if you are mixing roles like animation / compositing
C) Make sure that people using it for all of the above aren’t annoyed by dealing with the templates
D) Make these core templates available as part of the Blender Download
E) Keep consistency between views and keystrokes
F) Make loading the template view optional if opening someone elses project OR
G) Make templates a completely different file type, so you CAN’T just save as a blend, and you have to save a normal blend file.

The last two really are the important ones. If I have a template, I want to open every file I use with my set of UI templates. Unless I install another template I don’t want to see someone elses UI template just because I loaded their file.

I really do like where this is going, and if done well I think will help new adoption a lot!

I’m completely in agreement with you, Andre. Especially, concerning the last two points you made. Because if we can modify and create our own templates and save it to our projects it should be distinct from the .blend file. If an extension can more than five characters, it could be named .bplate, .blendate, .blndate, or .blendtp. Personally, I like .blendate because it is very distinct like the .blend file and there is little guesswork in figuring what program it should be associated with and such.

I’d find useful having mechanical cad tools, but just if they’re based on nurbs (or at least on t-splines) so it can be precise enough for that use. If there isn’t any possibility to control the precision of the exported mesh, it will not be suitable for many uses (for example 3d printing) in which it must be controlled to achieve a good result. Maybe this could be achieved through a plugin that simplified file exchanges between blender and solvespace or ayam (freecad is still too unstable).
Although I don’t expect blender 2.8 to be an alternative to Siemens NX, it would be great if it had some Rhino features, that could be improved through some open engineering projects (similar to open movies)

I think this is great! My 9-year-old son recently took an online course through Youth Digital for animating in Blender using Minecraft models. All the assets were premade, so he just needed to focus on posing and key-framing to make an animation. So, setting up workspaces for “Basic Modeling” and “Basic Rigging” would help anyone focus on a task. One of the things I notice that engages my son are simple 3D voxel models (Crossy Roads, Minecraft and Trove). He even likes looking at Qixels to make real-world models. I think it would be a great idea to have a few simple workspaces where a child can make models with voxels, since they are simple and you can see results right away. Having something like a drag and drop GUI to apply bones would be neat to, as a way to introduce rigging. Daz 3D has built-in tutorials that will walk you through the interface to achieve tasks. So, maybe a “Tutorial” workspace would be cool too, where the screen would highlight steps in the interface to do tasks like “Add a primitive” all the way up to “Making your own addon”. It would be interesting to see if developers have an idea of things you should learn and in what order.

Blender is awesome! I’ve run into a few issues with it, though. Some things that would really help out with creating game assets:

– add an alpha channel to vertex colors
– let each face-vertex track its own normal information. Low poly assets often require precise tweaking of normals and right now all normal information is calculated on the fly
– allow uv animation to play back in the viewport
– give Blender the ability to work with general GLSL shaders and render them in the viewport
– have a window that lets you see/manage all materials in the scene.

Late reply, but I think the name “template” is a bit misleading. I would guess most people think of templates as a content base to work from as opposed to a tool configuration and setup. A template in a word processor is for example typically used to make sure the document looks a certain way, not to configure the word processor. Same for the web or programming, where you have template pages and files to use as starting point for the content one creates.

A CAD functionality would be great.
I use some times Blender to construct some parts for 3D printing.
I miss some typical measure tools and also some possible assignments. Like to fix the distance form edge.
Also the construction of o hole at posstion (x,y) are some constructions steps. This is to siplify.

A slicer tool is not necessery inside blender. 3D printer interface is STL format. Some slicer tools are stable like Slic3r.org or cura.

Will Eevee support panoramic cameras and environments? I do a lot of work with a 180 degree panoramic equidistant camera and to get an idea of what things will look like real time would be a HUGE benefit.

I tried out the pre-release version for Windows and couldn’t even change the image size. But I’m sure that’s coming.

great info. I downloaded blender two years ago and gave up- it was to complicated. Even step by step tutorials didn’t help with tracking the video. Either the new interface will help or I am too stup1d 😉

Blender 2.78c installation is currently a one step process, if recognizes your platform, and installs the proper version….. You may still need to set or “program” different mouses to scroll for zooming, toggle full screen (alt-F10) and render out using the side buttons alt F-12 (if available) just to make those tasks easier as they are used so often with Blender and different operating system and mouse differ in how they use those buttons by default, but really, Blender has changed a lot in 2 years so you should give it another try now….
… especially when 2.8 comes out….the current 2.78c is pretty rock solid and even caught itself as it tried to crash, recovered and picked up rendering where it left off all automagically for me the other day…I don’t know how that worked, but it was a pleasant surprise!!!

Please don’t add buttons all over the UI to simplify things. It will make blender interface more complex and more like 3ds max or other 3d applications. we need more functionality and flexibility with the shortcuts system blender already has. If you guys decide to add those menu bars and ribbons please make sure they are easily arrangeable and take minimum space as necessary. Because once you add those things there is no coming back.

I love the idea of tailored workspaces!
Have you guys given any thought to a grease pencil animation workspace? That could be really useful. I am very interested in the options that grease pencil opens up in my animation workflow, but I find it difficult to navigate in Blender 2.78. Features are confusing and hard to find, but it seems very robust. Hand-drawn animation in a 3D environment just seems very cool to me, and I’d like to have an easier time understanding the workflow.

Just what I’ve been waiting for. Making blender user friendly (usable) for everyone is a fantastic idea. I know exactly how Barrack feels. The option to load a restricted interface for beginners (like me) will enable us to focus on learning and not be distracted by all the complexity, this can only be a good thing.

The idea of tailored workspaces for game/simulation model development will attract more users from my particular community. Currently, those of us using Blender for model development think we use less than 10% of Blender capability. The interface does does put many off using Blender.

Thank you for making blender more game maker-friendly – I think that if there was even less Python / or / coding the better for the beginner. there should be a teleport function connected to the touch such as : if you touch A1 it will take you to A2 then you only have to decide what A1 is and what A2 is .. and you could change the names of A1 or A2 to anything you wanted and it would still get there…

Oh, and for the 101 project….please include basic presets that the average person can relate to:
For simplified template/workspace
1. Lighting…
Flame/Fire light prest with basic adjustments possible
incandescent with basic adjustments like brightness and color
Florescent, LED single and LED Bulb/array with basic contros
2. Basic material presets…simple glass, steel, plastic, dirt/rock/stone, wood (fine, med and weathered), adjustable tile/brick with ajustable color/ texture/ specular and joint width/pattern
and a skin with fuzzines/hair adjustments
3. basic rig (maybe rigged human mesh with simple intuitive controls) with animation presets for walkcycles, standing, sitting, object grasp/release (that could be later modified or enhanced through further editing)
4. basic Cameras: 35 mm, wide angle, zoom/out…. or better yet, In Camera preview mode (0) have adjustments appear next to/ in frame view i.e. sliders for frame dimensions/ resolution, angle, zoom, clipping, focus, blur, cam view exposure/brightness/ color tint and contrast …. and maybe include option to render current frame or all frames (off screen) and convert to clip automatically add to VSE
Editor channel or list similar to the way imported images and materials show up in other menu lists now…. in one step… one button. And finally an in-camera track to object button that you can can select either through the selected camera’s frame or simply in 3D-view by selecting a camera add-select object in regular 3D View and be prompted with option to target this object?
Simplify 101 Environment presets to Interior box/cube/room mesh with 1/2/3 lights + camera Or basic outdoor presets…. ( Desert/forest/beach/mountain/island view) with basic ground/platform/water and basic weather types/time of day (with basic outdoor natural landscaping objects/materials (rocks, trees, shrubs, flowers) ready to edit ( with option to view node preset structures for each…great way to learn how things are put together!)
All of these would be huge time savers and prevent having to run to the properties/contstraints/node menus and setting all kinds of advanced settings first….

I’m replyig to myself to add note about “101 presets”… have an “advanced/simple” toggle button/option that allows you to choose between preset defaults or simple customize or regular “advanced” options editing modes for that preset… that way newbies can get to work fast and intuitively, learn what different options do before learning entire interface/menus/commands methods and workflows and move on to the more detailed stuf of what “makes thimgs tick” when curiousity or experience levels increases….
just suggestions…. These features could be added simply at first with later updates adding more complexity in later releases….
but til then I’m confident the fine crew working on this will come up with great ways to accomplish these “ease of learning” goals… cheers.

When considering the “Simple” mode, please set intuitive defaults like using left-click for primary selection. This is a standard across all common computer programs and there is no good reason for Blender to buck the trend (other than developers sticking to a stubborn legacy mistake). I remember the first few times I opened Blender, I gave up out of frustration thinking the program was so hard that I couldn’t even figure out how to select the default cube. Small disconnects like this are disastrous for new adoption.

Also, don’t limit your thinking for “Simple” mode to Blender-for-Teens. There are plenty of seasoned professionals who would like to learn 3D, but find the learning curve (for all packages) incredibly daunting. A well-designed simple mode could work for all first-timers. A dedicated and super-simplified/limited “Kids” mode would be appropriate for children under 10.

Because the idea behind this is to make Blender easier to use, this would be the ideal point to adopt some industry standards. I’ve been working in the games industry as a 3D and UI artist using Maya and Max for over 15 years, and use Blender at home. It would be great to use it at work, and have a few of my colleagues use it too, but to be honest it is very difficult to persuade a professional level artist to use Blender because the User Interface is so obscure compared to almost every other package.

A few small changes would make a big difference to usability: 1) Using the standard keyboard shortcuts such as WER to choose the position, rotate, scale manipulators, K to set a key etc. Same as Unity, Unreal, Maya, Max etc. 2) Using the standard mouse controls for selection and camera movement 3) (as mentioned earlier in the thread) Having a visible menu where the user can find all the potential options they could need – a menu at the top of the screen containing the contents of the dynamic context menu plugin would work. 5) Floating / Dockable menus, like pretty much every 3D application. 5) Having this stuff turned on by default.

By changing these few things, it would make it so much easier for people to start using Blender if they’ve ever used another package, and for Blender users to migrate to use those packages if they choose to do so.

When you say a template could made available as an AddOn. Could a power user and/or part time programmer (i.e. not a 3D programming expert at all) develop custom templates to be distributed to others for niche purposes? I’m thinking of enabling the distribution of Blender to end users who have never used it before but have a niche need for a good 3D model creation and maintenance tool (especially 3D model maintenance). The use cases I have in mind for this would likely be similar to the CAD template but more specialized and different in purpose than CAD. So templates included in Blender will be great, but enabling the creation and targeted distribution of 3rd party templates could really expand the Blender potential user community to areas not directly supported by Blender “out of the box”. So once templates are added to Blender, please consider adding a template development and packaging tool targeted at advanced Blender users and/or general application programmers from disciplines other than 3D but who want to support other 3D related use cases.

It coytainly is ixxcoyting! No doubt. Nyuknyuknyuk!
Thank you for the brilliant software… oh, and the tutes.. invaluable. 2.8… can’t wait.
I’m a 57 year old beginner currently studying 2D, but… suddenly… 3D is lookin’ smokin’ hot.
I am on it baby! All over it like a cheap suit.
With thanks and high regards,
Noly.

that is why blender is Far from CAD software like autocad & skecthup does…for ex. when u put a window on a wall for instance., blender artist where just guessing where it should be put on.. but there has to be a precise location that Cad users want it to be placed in and that’s the time its too difficult for us too use it…maybe blender devs should get some advice to other Cad Users or professionals…..